Alex Rosenthal

What kind of creature was it?

And who opened the hatch?

I'll show you what I see.

Nothing!

That's because I have a condition called aphantasia, which is where I don't have access to my mind's eye.

It turns out that the mind's eye is a spectrum.

On one end are about two to four percent of us with aphantasia, and at the other extreme is hyperphantasia.

That's where you can visualize an exquisite detail, sometimes even able to superimpose what you're imagining on reality.

That's about three to six percent of people.

Everyone else is somewhere in between, but there's a huge range of experience here.

Everyone I do this with not only describes something different, but describes the experience of experiencing it differently.

So I went through most of my life assuming that most people or everyone was like me, that visualization exercise like this is a figure of speech that no one could actually do.

So imagine my surprise and fascination and apprehension when I learned about aphantasia, the last because it raised some scary questions like, have I been working in entirely the wrong careers my entire life?

So, aphantasia changes the way that those of us who have it perceive information and consume and process information.

So for example, most people I speak to who have a mind's eye describe the experience of reading a novel as seeing scenes play out in their mind and casting characters.

I can't do either of those things.

It's a much more conceptual experience for me.

And when something is out of sight, it's very much out of mind.

I have a five-year-old daughter,

I can't in this moment imagine her face.